The Bunker

I'm in the concrete bunker that is our cellar throwing paper into the recycling bin. By far most of the paper is junk mail -- catalogs for furniture stores and menus for pizza delivery services and little booklets showcasing the new season's fashions, and it's one of these booklets that catches my eye and makes me pause in the dim light and look more closely. Underwear models. But there's something else here on this page -- part of my mind knows something more but the message isn't getting through to the rest and the result is that I'm standing frozen still here at the recycling bin staring at a page with two underwear models on it: one sleek, dark-haired woman and one chiseled brown-haired man. That's an amazingly muscular body he has; each muscle forms its own individual bulge; he would make a good anatomy teaching-aid. A lot of working out must have gone into that. Yes, a lot of working out, a lot of time, time that people have, for example, when they don't stand at the recycling bin staring at underwear models and wondering how they got into such good shape. And that's what separates us: the underwear model does things and I just think about them. And then I look at his face and my mind explodes as finally the signal, the reason I'm staring at the page hits me: I know this man!

I was sitting at the table happy in the knowledge that the cold beer in front of me was mine; so wrapped up in it I was that I hardly registered the person in a little tan leather jacket sitting opposite me . But as my acute thirst subsided with subsequent draws from the glass, my interest in the stranger rose. He wore a smirk on his face. And said nothing. And so I started by introducing myself, to which he told me his name, which as usual I didn't manage to remember for much longer than a few seconds. It probably wasn't an interesting name, and his name is irrelevant anyway, but he did at least tell it to me. And so after quickly exhausting the banal topic of current weather (we were sitting outside) I asked him what he did.
"Well... I'm here for two weeks and then I'm in Hamburg for a week and then I'm moving on to London."
"Ah," I replied. A strange response to my question. I paused to give him the chance to add something. But he didn't. He just went back to his smirk.
"So you're traveling. Nice. Is it just for pleasure?"
"No."

That brought to an end my attempt to speak to him. I had friends on both sides of me and so it was no problem -- I just left the stranger to his silence.

A little later, while I was chatting to my friends, I heard someone else ask the stranger in the tan jacket what he did, and again his bizarre answer was the list of cities that he had recited to me.

The night wound on. Glasses filled with beer arrived frequently to replace empty glasses from the round before. The darkness became darker, and for a time it rained down heavily onto our shelter, but soon that passed and left a pleasant coolness to replace the dank oppression that hung in the air before it. At a pause in conversation with my friends, it occurred to me the stranger was still there and had not been part of any conversation for hours.
"So," I asked, "what exactly are you doing here in town?"
"Well..." I could see his discomfort at my question; I was happy I'd emphasized the word exactly: it seemed to make him squirm. But why?
"I'm a model," he said in resignation, as though he had been cracked.
With those words several sets of eyes from around the table started scanning him; although I tried not to, I felt myself doing the same. It fits, I thought; his hair looked like it had been done by a stylist, his face was almost too perfectly sculpted and the tight fitting t-shirt he was wearing under his jacket revealed prominent muscular bulges. Why was he so reluctant to reveal his occupation? Since I was by now fairly drunk, I asked that out loud.
"People's opinions of you change when they know that you're a model. That you make money from your face and your body. Conversation changes immediately. It happens to me all the time."
"So what?," I said. "Everyone has their own abilities, and if all goes well, an occupation that fits those abilities. If someone tells you they're a doctor, you also make assumptions about that person. It's part of getting to know that person. If you're having a conversation with a stranger, you're not going to get around the question of what you do for a living; it's part of what defines you."
"I don't want to be defined by my looks. I think I'm much more than that. But I suppose you're right."
"Of course I'm right," I said.
That was the end of our discussion, because a middle-aged woman then came from down the other side of the table and seated herself next to the model.
"Well I'm coming to speak to my new little model friend now," she said as she flung her hair over her ear. Sympathy for him rose in me as I listened (for hearing it was unavoidable) to the painful conversation that ensued, which involved him telling her of his dreams to start his own marketing company, and her telling him that he'd always have a place to spend the night, that she was just a phone-call away.
"Thank-you," he said. Shortly afterwards he said he needed to go, and so he got up and said good-bye and left.
"You can't tell me he was straight," said my friend to the right of me.

I throw the fashion catalog into the bin to lie with pictures of furniture and pizzas, and head back up to my flat.